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.
- 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 or analytics trackers.
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 and fulfilment data is used to perform the contract, deliver licensed files, recover paid purchases 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; and Cloudflare R2 for private file storage and short-lived download delivery. 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 temporary sessions
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.
7. Retention and security
Order and entitlement records are retained as needed to provide ongoing purchase access and meet accounting, legal and dispute-handling requirements. 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.