What we keep,
and what we don’t.

The short version

This website does not advertise to you, does not profile you and does not track you across other sites. It asks once whether it may count your visit, and if you say no, nothing is loaded and nothing is counted.

We hold your personal details when you write to us, when you apply to volunteer, and when you subscribe to the newsletter. Nothing else about your visit is stored by us.

Who we are

Invisible Borders Trans-African Photographers Organisation, registered in 2011 under the Corporate Affairs Commission of Nigeria.

For anything in this policy, write to info@invisible-borders.com.

When you read this site

We ask before we count. On your first visit a strip at the foot of the window asks whether we may use Google Analytics to count visits. Until you answer, and forever if you answer no, nothing is loaded — Google is not contacted at all. Declining is one click and costs you nothing on this site.

If you agree. Google Analytics sets cookies on your device and sends Google information about your visit: the pages you open, roughly where in the world you are, your browser and screen, and how you arrived. We use it to understand which work people read. Google is a separate company in the United States and its own privacy policy governs what it does with that data. We have asked it to shorten your IP address.

Nothing else on this site tracks you. No advertising, no third-party pixels, no profiling, no tracking across other websites. If you decline, the only thing stored on your device is a note of that refusal, so we do not ask again.

Changing your mind. You can, at any time, at the bottom of this page. Declining later stops any further collection, but it cannot recall what Google has already received, and we will not pretend otherwise.

Counting without cookies. Our host, Automattic, runs a simple visit counter on every WordPress.com site. It records that a page was viewed and which links were followed off it, and it does so without placing anything on your device — which is why it is not part of the question above. It produces a tally, not a profile, and we cannot use it to identify you.

Server logs. Like any website, the server that delivers these pages keeps short operational records of requests made to it. These can include your IP address, the page requested, the time, and your browser type. They exist so the site can be kept running and secure. They are not used to build a picture of you and are not combined with anything else.

Video

Some pages offer video hosted on YouTube — the TEDx talk on the About page, and films linked from the Moving Archive.

Nothing is requested from YouTube until you press play. Until you do, the panel you see is built from our own type and colour, with no third-party thumbnail and no third-party cookie. This is deliberate: an embedded player that loads on page view would contact Google on your behalf before you had decided to watch anything.

When you do press play, the video loads from youtube-nocookie.com, which limits what is stored. From that moment you are also interacting with Google, and Google’s own privacy policy applies to what happens in the player.

Links that take you to YouTube, Typeform, FIELD or a social platform are ordinary links. Following one takes you to that organisation, under their terms, not ours.

When you write to us

The contact page lists several addresses so a message reaches the person who can answer it. When you write, we hold your email address, your name if you give it, and whatever you chose to tell us — for as long as it takes to deal with your message, and then for a reasonable period afterwards in case the conversation resumes.

We use it to reply to you. We do not add you to a mailing list because you wrote to us, and we do not pass your message to anyone outside the organisation unless you have asked us to.

When you apply to volunteer

Volunteer applications are made through a form hosted by Typeform, not on this website. What you enter is submitted to Typeform and reaches us from there, so Typeform processes it on our behalf and their privacy policy also applies to it.

We use an application to assess whether a role fits, and to contact you about it. We keep applications for the length of the recruitment and for a limited period afterwards, so that we can come back to you if something suitable appears. If you would rather we did not keep yours, write to us and we will remove it.

The newsletter

The newsletter is delivered by Mailchimp. When you subscribe, your email address goes from your browser to Mailchimp — it does not pass through this website and is not stored here. Mailchimp is a company in the United States and its privacy policy applies to what it holds.

We use the list to send occasional letters from the road, the archive and the Journal. Nothing else. We do not sell it, rent it or pass it on, and we do not add anyone who has not asked.

Every letter carries an unsubscribe link, and it works immediately. You can also write to us and we will remove you.

Social media

Our accounts on Instagram, Facebook, X, YouTube and LinkedIn appear on this site as plain links. There are no embedded feeds, follow buttons or platform scripts, so those companies are not told that you visited this site. That only changes if you click through to them.

What we do not do

• We do not sell or rent personal information. There is no circumstance in which we would.
• We do not share it with advertisers or data brokers.
• We do not build profiles, score visitors, or make automated decisions about anyone.
• We do not track you across other websites, and we have no means of doing so.
• We do not count you at all unless you have agreed to be counted.

Your rights

You can ask us what personal information we hold about you, ask for a copy of it, ask us to correct it if it is wrong, or ask us to delete it. You can also object to our holding it at all, and withdraw consent you have given.

Write to info@invisible-borders.com and say what you would like. We will not ask you to explain why, and asking costs nothing. We aim to answer within one month.

Because we hold very little, most of these requests are quickly settled: usually the answer is an email exchange, a volunteer application, or nothing at all.

If you are not satisfied

Tell us first, and we will try to put it right. If you would rather raise it with a regulator, you can complain to the Nigeria Data Protection Commission, where the organisation is registered. If you are in the United Kingdom, the European Union or the European Economic Area, you may also complain to the data protection authority in your own country.

Changes to this policy

When what we do changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top changes too. We will not quietly widen what we collect and leave this page describing an older, smaller version of it.