Last updated
The short version
- The site has no advertising and no analytics, and it does not follow you to other sites.
- If you only read the site, we keep nothing about you.
- If you become a member, we keep what you wrote on the membership form, in PSSN's Google account, where the board and its faculty sponsor can see it.
- The site shows which schools members study at. It never shows a member's name or email address.
- You can ask us at any time to show you, correct, or delete what we hold about you.
If you only visit
The site is delivered by Cloudflare. Like any web host, it sees your network (IP) address and some details of your browser each time you load a page, so that it can send you the page and turn away abuse. We keep no record of our own of who opened which page.
Searching happens in your own browser: what you type into the search box is not sent to us. The Ask a mentor form does not send your question anywhere yet. Before it does, this page will say what happens to a question.
The home page shows PSSN's Instagram posts in a frame that comes from Instagram. It loads only once you scroll near it. From then on Instagram, which is part of Meta, sees your visit as it would on any page that shows its content, and its own privacy policy applies. The same goes for the other sites we link to, such as the membership form on Google Forms, Discord, and Zoom.
Cookies
A cookie is a small note the site asks your browser to keep. Ours only remember that you have signed in. None is used for advertising or to follow you between sites, and each is sent back to this site alone.
If you become a member
You join through the membership form, which is a Google Form. It asks for your name, your email address and a second one if you want to give it, your school and where it is, your degree program, the year you expect to graduate, the year you are in now, whether you have a home program, your interests within plastic surgery, and whether you would like a leadership role.
Your answers are kept in a spreadsheet in PSSN's Google Workspace account, where PSSN's board, the students who run the network, and its faculty sponsor can see them. We use them to approve your membership, to send you a confirmation and a welcome email, to invite you to meetings through a members' mailing list, with the Zoom link, and to count how many members study at each school.
From all of that, the public site shows one thing: the schools members study at, on the home page's map and in its list. The map is shaded in three broad steps where more members study. The site never shows a member's name or email address, and it never shows how many members a school has.
If you sign in with your own email
A member can sign in with their own email address instead of the members' password. You type your address, we email you an 8-digit code from PSSN's Google account, and you type the code.
The site's own database, which Cloudflare hosts, knows you only by a Member ID: a random code on your row of the membership spreadsheet. It holds no names and no email addresses. This is what it keeps:
- That you are signed in on a device, until 60 days after your last visit there, or 180 days at most.
- The dates you first signed in and last visited. They are kept on your row of the spreadsheet.
- For one day, a scrambled fingerprint of the address and of the network behind each request for a code. It is there to stop someone asking for codes over and over, and the address cannot be read back from it.
- For 90 days, a log of what happened, such as a sign-in or a wrong code, with no addresses in it.
On My account you can see what we hold about you and correct it. What you change, and when, is noted in the spreadsheet.
On a day when the sign-in form is unusually busy, a check that you are a person runs before a code is sent. Cloudflare runs it, and while it is on, your network address and some details of your browser go to Cloudflare for that.
People named on the site
Board members and the founder are shown with their name, role, school, class year, and photo, each with their agreement. Speakers at past meetings are shown with their name, title, and talk. Mentors' answers carry the mentor's role and application cycle, never their name.
The members' guide to the PSTM meeting lists faculty from the meeting's public program, with their public photo and links to their public profiles. It is in the members' area.
If you are named here and want something changed or taken down, write to us.
Who else handles it
- Google holds the membership form, the spreadsheet, and the mailing list, and sends our emails.
- Cloudflare delivers the site, hosts the sign-in database of Member IDs, and runs the check for busy days.
- GitHub holds the site's code. No member's details are in it.
We do not sell or rent anyone's information, and we share it with nobody else unless the law requires it.
How long we keep it
We keep what you wrote on the membership form for as long as you are a member. Ask us to remove you, and we will delete your details from the form and the spreadsheet and take you off the mailing list. Anywhere you are signed in to the site is signed out within the hour.
The script that runs the membership list keeps a scrambled fingerprint of your address, so that it never sends you the same email twice. The address cannot be read back from it.
What signing in keeps, and for how long, is listed above.
Your choices
- To see, correct, or delete what we hold about you, write to us at the address at the foot of this page. Members who sign in with their own email can correct their details themselves, on My account.
- To stop the meeting emails, write to us and we will take you off the mailing list.
- The site does not follow you between sites, so there is nothing for it to switch off when your browser sends a Do Not Track signal. It treats every visitor the same.
Children
The site is for medical students and the physicians who teach them. It is not meant for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect anything from them.
Changes to this page
When what we keep or how we use it changes, this page changes first, and the date at the top with it. If a change affects what we hold about members, we will also tell members by email.
Contact
Questions about this page, or about what we hold about you, go to PSSN's board: contact@plasticsurgerystudentnetwork.org