Privacy

Last updated 19 September 2026 · Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation, Inc. (ATBC), the controller of this data. Questions, or any request below: conferences@tropicalbiology.org.

The short version

ATBC Connect is the membership platform of a scientific association. It holds the record of your membership and the profile you choose to publish to other members. We do not sell it, we do not share it for advertising, and there is no advertising or third-party analytics anywhere in it.

What we hold

Because you gave it to us

• Who you are — name, email, and any second email you add.
• Your profile, all of it optional except the few marked required when you first sign in: institution, department, position, career stage, country, city, postal address, phone, ORCID, website, photograph, short bio, research interests, taxa, biomes, languages, nationality, degree, gender and year of birth.
• Your membership — category, dates, payments and invoices.
• What you send in — forms you fill, event registrations, group memberships, job posts, mentoring requests, and support requests.
• Conference submissions, if you take part in an ATBC meeting: proposals, abstracts, grant applications and your registration.

Because the platform records it

• Sign-ins — the date of your last one, and whether you have updated your own profile.
• Failed sign-in attempts, with the IP address they came from. This is what stops somebody trying passwords against a list of email addresses that is public anyway. They are deleted after a few days.
• A record of the emails we send you — the address, the subject and whether it went out. Not the text.
• Newsletters — whether the message was opened and whether a link in it was followed. It is not exact, it is never linked to what you read on the platform, and every one of those emails carries an unsubscribe link that works without signing in.
• An audit trail of what the secretariat does to a record, so a change can be explained later.

Who can see it

• You, always, and you can change almost all of it yourself.
• Other members, only what your directory setting allows. The default is «members only». You can set it to «nobody» and stay out of the directory entirely; your membership is unaffected.
• The ATBC secretariat and the committees, for the work of running the association — dues, elections, the conference, and answering you.
• Nobody else. We do not sell it and we do not pass it on for advertising.

The outside services we use

Only what the platform cannot do by itself, and each one sees only what it needs:

• PayPal, when you pay dues or a registration. Your card never reaches us: PayPal takes the payment and tells us that it happened, for how much. We keep the receipt number.
• Our email provider, to deliver the messages the platform sends.
• The server, rented in Hong Kong, where the database lives.

ATBC is based in the United States and its members are everywhere, so your data is handled outside your own country. That is inherent to a worldwide association, and it is protected the same wherever it sits.

Cookies

Two, and both are needed for the platform to work at all: one that keeps you signed in, and one that stops a form being submitted from somewhere else. There are no advertising cookies, no trackers and no analytics — which is why this platform never asks you to accept anything.

How long we keep it

Your record stays while you are a member and afterwards, because the history of who belonged to ATBC and when is part of the association's own record, and because a lapsed membership is usually renewed. Payments and invoices are kept as long as the accounts require. Failed sign-in attempts go after a few days. You can ask us to erase the rest at any time.

What you can ask for

• A copy of everything we hold about you, in a file you can read.
• A correction, though most of it you can correct yourself.
• Erasure. We will do it, keeping only what the accounts oblige us to keep, and we will tell you exactly what stayed and why.
• To stop the newsletters, from the link in any of them, without signing in and without losing your membership.
• To disappear from the directory, from your own profile.

Write to conferences@tropicalbiology.org. We answer within a month; if it will take longer we will say so before that.

The phone app

The app is this same platform. It holds nothing extra on your phone beyond the design of the pages, so that it opens on a slow connection: your own information is not kept on the device and travels only while you are looking at it. It asks for no permissions — no location, no contacts, no camera.

Children

ATBC Connect is for members of a scientific association and is not intended for anyone under 16. If a record turns out to belong to a child, write to us and we will remove it.

Changes

If this ever says something materially different, we will tell members by email rather than change the date quietly.