Privacy Policy

The Infectious Disease Society of Georgia (“IDSG,” “we,” “us,” or “our”) runs the website at idsocietyga.org, including its meeting RSVPs and membership pages (the “Site”). This policy says what we collect, where it is kept, who can see it, and how to have it removed. It describes what the Site actually does today; where something is planned rather than built, it says so.

When you RSVP to a meeting

The RSVP form asks for your name and email address, both required, and optionally your credentials (MD, DO, NP, PA, PharmD and so on), any dietary restrictions, and anything else you choose to type in the notes box. We use these to plan the dinner: to know how many people are coming, to give the venue a headcount and a list of dietary needs, and to recognize members where a meeting is limited to them.

Your reply is stored in our Firebase Firestore database, where it can be read only by named members of the IDSG board signing in with a verified Google account. It is not published, not listed anywhere on the Site, and not visible to other attendees.

Please do not put clinical information about yourself or anyone else in the dietary or notes boxes. They exist for catering and for practical requests, and a food allergy is as much detail as either needs.

We send one email about a meeting you have replied to: about two days beforehand, asking whether you are still coming, with a link to confirm and a link to cancel. It goes to the address you gave on the form, through Resend (below). Nothing is sent when you reply — the Site offers you buttons to add the meeting to your own calendar instead. If you cancel through the link, your reply is kept and marked cancelled rather than deleted, so the board can tell a cancellation apart from somebody who never replied.

Replying also puts you on our contact list. If we do not already have you, your name and email address — and your credentials, if you gave them — are added to the society’s contact records, so the board can tell you about future meetings and society news. Replying to a meeting is how most people first tell us how to reach them, and this is the list we reach them on.

If you are already on that list under either address we hold for you, nothing new is created and your existing record is left exactly as it is — we do not overwrite what is already there. A reply taken at the door without an email address is not added at all, because there would be no way to tell whose record it was. The contact list is held in the same database, under the same board-only restriction, as everything else described here.

Your name and email address are also held by Resend, the service we use to send society email. Nothing else is — not your phone number, address, credentials, dietary notes or payment history. Which of our lists you are on reflects whether your dues are current, so that a notice about renewing does not go to somebody who has just paid. Every mailing we send carries an unsubscribe link, and using it stops the email without affecting anything else described on this page.

You can come off the list whenever you like. Email idsociety.georgia@gmail.com and say so, and we will remove you — there is no account to close and no form to fill in. Removing you from our contact records also removes you from Resend, usually within seconds and at the latest by the following day. Coming off the contact list does not cancel your membership, does not withdraw an RSVP you have already made, and does not stop you replying to future meetings.

To stop the form being abused we use a hidden field that only automated scripts fill in, a check that the form was not completed impossibly fast, and a limit on how many times one internet connection can submit in a short period. Your IP address is used for that limit while the request is being handled and is not written to our database.

If a meeting is limited to members, the address you enter is checked against our membership list at the moment you submit. That check only reads the membership list — replying to a meeting never makes you a member, and never records anything about your dues. It is separate from the contact list described above, which is about how to reach you rather than what you have paid.

When you join or renew

The join form asks for your name, email address, optionally your credentials, and two short answers: the topics you would like upcoming meetings to cover and where you would like them held. All of it goes into our membership records, where the board reads it to plan the season; the two answers are also emailed to the board when you join. We record each payment as well: the amount, the date, the method, and whether it has cleared.

Payment is taken by Stripe. You enter your card on Stripe’s own checkout page, never on this Site, and IDSG never receives, sees or stores your card number. We give Stripe your name and email address so it can identify the payment and send you a receipt, and Stripe handles that information under its own privacy policy. Because membership renews automatically, Stripe keeps your card on file for the renewal charge each 1 January; we keep only Stripe’s reference numbers for you, your subscription and each payment, and whether renewal is switched on.

Emails about your membership — a welcome when you join, a reminder about a week before each renewal, and a notice if a renewal fails — are sent through Resend to the address you gave us. Each carries a link that turns automatic renewal off. These are notices about a charge to your card rather than a mailing, so they are sent even if you have unsubscribed from society mailings; turning renewal off is what stops them.

We also keep contact details some members have given us through the society’s form — postal address, phone number and professional designation — in the same place and under the same restrictions as the membership records.

Who can see any of this

Membership records, payment records, contact details and meeting replies are all held in Firebase Firestore and are readable only by an allowlist of named board email addresses, enforced by the database itself rather than by hiding a page. Signing in with any other Google account gets you nothing.

We do not sell, rent or trade your information. We share it only where we have to: with the venue for a meeting, as a headcount and dietary list; with a CME accreditor, where credit has to be recorded; and where the law requires it.

The services this Site runs on

Running the Site means a small number of companies necessarily handle some information:

• Vercel hosts the Site. Its servers see the usual request information — IP address, browser, page requested — and keep it in operational logs.
• Google Firebase stores the membership records and meeting replies described above, and handles board sign-in.
• Sanity stores the Site’s public content: meetings, news, photographs, officer profiles. Photographs and other images are delivered from Sanity’s servers, which means those servers see your IP address when a page shows one. No personal information about you is stored in Sanity.
• Stripe takes online dues payments and holds the card details for renewal. It sees your name, email address and card; we never do. It also sends you its own receipt for each payment.
• Resend sends the society’s email — mailings, membership notices and meeting reminders — and holds the mailing list: names and email addresses only, kept in step with our contact records automatically.
• Google Fonts supplies the typefaces. Your browser fetches them from Google on every page, which discloses your IP address and browser to Google.

Cookies, tracking and analytics

This Site sets no cookies of its own, and runs no analytics, advertising or tracking of any kind. There is no Google Analytics, no tag manager, no advertising pixel, and no third-party script that follows you between sites.

Two small things are remembered by your own browser and never sent to us: which board members you have already been shown on the About page, so the order varies between visits, and whether the “Ask IDSG” helper has already prompted you in this browsing session. The search box and the “Ask IDSG” helper both run entirely inside your browser — what you type into either is never sent to us or to anyone else.

Because there is no consensus on how sites should respond to browser “Do Not Track” signals, we do not respond to them. There is nothing here for them to switch off.

How long we keep things

Meeting replies are kept as a record of who attended, including replies that were later cancelled — the board needs to tell a cancellation apart from someone who never replied. Membership and payment records are kept for as long as they are needed to run the society and reconcile its accounts. Nothing is deleted automatically.

Contact records are kept until you ask to come off the list, or until they are plainly no longer of use to the society.

You can ask us at any time to tell you what we hold about you, correct it, or delete it. Write to idsociety.georgia@gmail.com and we will do it, keeping only what we are obliged to keep.

Security, honestly stated

Personal information is held in a database that refuses every request except from named board accounts, and the pages that write to it run on servers rather than in your browser, so the keys involved are never handed out. That said, no system is perfectly secure, and we will not claim otherwise.

Our server logs record that an RSVP was saved, and, where a submission is rejected as automated, the name that was typed — so that we can spot a genuine reply wrongly refused. They do not record email addresses.

Children

The Site is for healthcare professionals and other adults. It is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If you believe a minor has given us information, write to idsociety.georgia@gmail.com and we will delete it.

Changes

If this policy changes we will revise the effective date above and post the new version here, before the change takes effect rather than after.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or a request to see, correct or delete what we hold: email idsociety.georgia@gmail.com.