Who we are
Book My Talk is a free service run by Awais Kamran, an independent developer. In this policy “we” and “us” mean Awais Kamran running Book My Talk. We decide how the personal data described here is used, which makes us its controller under laws such as the GDPR.
Two hand-offs are worth knowing about. When an organizer sends a request, the speaker receives the organizer's details. When a speaker accepts and issues a backstage pass, the organizer receives the speaker's backstage details. From then on, each of them is responsible for what they do with what they received.
For questions, requests or complaints, email hello@bookmytalk.dev or leave a private note on the feedback page.
What we collect
From speakers
- Your email address, to sign you in and send you requests. If you sign in with Google, Google also shares your name and the link to your profile picture. We use the name to start your profile.
- Your public profile: handle, name, headline, city, country, timezone, bios, headshot, languages, links, talks, the request types you take, any price you set for a paid ticket, your remote hours and your house rules.
- Your availability: days you mark as dark, any note you add to them, and the travel days we block around accepted talks.
- Your backstage details, if you add them: legal name, phone, WhatsApp, contact email, emergency contact, vehicle make, model, colour and plate, and driver.
- What you do in your inbox: which requests you accept, decline or cancel, your decline reasons and messages, the dates you suggest, and the organizers you block.
- Google Calendar data, if you connect it. Google Calendar below says exactly what that is.
From organizers
- The booking slip: your name, email, role, the kind of organization you're with and its name, your city and country, an optional link, and the event details. Those are the event name, dates or start time and timezone, format, city, venue or platform, the talk you want, audience size, whether travel is covered, and your message.
- What happens to your request afterwards, including when and how often its backstage pass is opened.
From everyone
- Feedback you send: the text, its type, whether you're a speaker or an organizer, the page you came from, your email if you give it, and your account if you're signed in.
- Votes on the feedback board, recorded against a random ID kept in a cookie. We store a hash of that ID, never the ID itself.
- A keyed hash of your network (IP) address when you send a booking request or feedback, so we can limit how many arrive from one place. We don't store the address itself.
- Standard technical logs kept by our hosting and database providers, such as IP address, browser and time of request, used for security and debugging.
How we use it
We use personal data to run the service and keep it working. Where the GDPR or a similar law applies, each use rests on one of these legal bases.
- Running the service
- Publishing speaker pages, delivering booking requests, sending the emails listed below, issuing passes and calendar files, and adding accepted talks to a speaker's calendar. Basis: performing our agreement with you, or steps you asked for before one exists.
- Keeping it safe
- Rate limits, spam filtering, blocking abuse and investigating problems. Basis: our legitimate interest in a service that isn't misused.
- Improving it
- Reading feedback, and replying when you leave an email. Basis: legitimate interest, and your consent for the reply.
- Google Calendar
- Reading busy times and adding accepted talks. Basis: your consent, which you withdraw by disconnecting.
- Legal duties
- Keeping or handing over data when a law or a valid legal request requires it. Basis: legal obligation.
Every email we send is about something you did or something waiting for you: sign-in links, request received, new request, accepted, declined, cancelled, a pass reminder in the two days before the event, and a nudge to speakers when requests have waited three days. There is no newsletter and no marketing email.
We don't sell personal data, use it for advertising, build profiles of you for anyone else, or use it to train AI models.
Who can see what
Anyone on the internet
- A speaker's public profile and talks, the poster and link-preview images made from them, and their availability calendar. The calendar shows whether each day is free, busy, dark or too soon, never why.
- Search engines can list speaker pages unless the speaker unticks “Show my page in Google and other search engines”. That adds a noindex tag and drops the page from our sitemap. Anyone with the link can still open it, and search engines can take a while to forget pages they already listed.
- Headshots, which sit at a public web address so pages, posters and organizers can load them.
The speaker
- Everything on a booking slip addressed to them, including the organizer's email. Replies to the new-request email go to the organizer.
The organizer
- Once a request is accepted, the backstage pass. It shows the speaker's backstage details and a speaker kit with their headshot, bios and the accepted talk, and offers a calendar file.
- The speaker's sign-in email. Emails about an accepted request, a cancellation or a new pass use it as the reply-to address, so replies reach the speaker.
- A pass stops working at the end of the day after the event, and the speaker can revoke it sooner. Anything the organizer already saved or downloaded stays with them, which is why the terms limit passes to the event team.
- The pass tells the organizer that the speaker can see when it was opened.
The feedback board
- Titles of feature requests left public, once we've read them. Descriptions and email addresses never appear.
Google Calendar
Connecting Google Calendar is optional and separate from signing in with Google. Connecting grants three permissions.
- Free/busy (
calendar.freebusy): the start and end times of busy blocks on the calendars you choose. This permission can't see event titles, descriptions, locations or guests. - Calendar list (
calendar.calendarlist.readonly): the names and IDs of your calendars, so you can choose which ones count as busy and which one gets your talks. - Events you own (
calendar.events.owned): lets us add an event to your calendar when you accept a request, and remove it if you cancel. We only touch events we created.
We store your Google email address, your calendars' names and IDs, the total busy minutes for each day and an encrypted refresh token. Busy times are refreshed when your page needs them and once a day. The event we add holds the event name, dates and location, the organizer's name, role, organization and email, the talk title and a link to your inbox.
Disconnecting revokes our access with Google and deletes everything we stored about the connection. Events we already added stay in your calendar. You can also remove our access from your Google Account.
Book My Talk's use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. We use Google data only to show your availability and keep your calendar in step with your bookings. We don't use it for advertising, sell it, use it to train AI models, or let anyone read it unless you ask us to, security requires it, or the law does.
Services we rely on
A few companies run parts of Book My Talk for us. They handle personal data only to provide their service to us, under their data processing terms.
- Supabase
- Database and sign-in. Holds accounts, profiles, requests and everything else in the database.
- Vercel
- Hosting. Runs the site and the daily job that sends reminders and refreshes calendars.
- Amazon Web Services
- S3 stores headshots. SES delivers our emails, so it handles each email's addresses and content.
- Sign-in, if you choose it, and Google Calendar, if you connect it.
Sharing to LinkedIn opens LinkedIn with your link. Whatever you post there falls under LinkedIn's privacy policy. We don't send LinkedIn any data ourselves.
Beyond these providers, we share personal data only when the law requires it, to protect someone's safety or rights, or if Book My Talk moves to a new owner. A new owner would have to keep to this policy, and we'd tell speakers before the move.
Where it's processed
Our providers run servers in several countries, including the United States and member states of the European Union, so your data may be processed outside the country you live in. Where the law requires safeguards for those transfers, we rely on the ones our providers offer, such as the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses.
How we protect it
- Backstage details, Google refresh tokens and organizer links are encrypted with AES-256-GCM before they reach the database.
- Private links for requests and passes are long random tokens, and we look them up by a hash.
- Database rules let each speaker read only their own requests, and keep backstage details, Google connections, block lists and feedback out of reach of browsers entirely.
- Pages opened from a private link are kept out of search engines and don't pass their address on to other sites.
- Everything travels over HTTPS.
No system is perfect, and anyone holding a private link can open it, so keep yours to yourself. If a breach puts your data at risk, we'll tell you and the authorities as the law requires.
How long we keep it
- A speaker's account and everything attached to it stay until the speaker deletes their page from the profile screen.
- Deleting a page removes the account, profile, talks, availability, every request and pass, backstage details, the block list, the Google connection and uploaded headshots. It happens straight away and can't be undone.
- Requests stay with the speaker's account so they keep a record of past bookings. Withdrawing a request marks it cancelled without erasing it. Organizers can ask us to erase a request at any time.
- Backstage passes stop working at the end of the day after the event, or sooner if the speaker revokes them.
- Feedback stays until we no longer need it or you ask us to delete it. If you delete your account, feedback you sent is kept without the link to your account.
- Hashed network addresses are kept with the request or feedback they arrived with.
- Provider backups and technical logs can hold copies for a short time after deletion, until they're overwritten.
Some things are out of our reach once sent: emails already delivered, events already in someone's calendar, details an organizer saved from a pass, and posters already posted elsewhere.
Your choices and rights
Things you can do yourself
- Speakers can edit or clear anything on their profile and backstage details.
- Speakers can keep their page out of search engines, or stop taking requests.
- Speakers can revoke a backstage pass, disconnect Google Calendar, and block an organizer when declining their request.
- Speakers can delete their page and everything attached to it.
- Organizers can withdraw a pending request from its private status link.
Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access the personal data we hold about you, correct it, delete it, get a copy in a portable format, restrict or object to how we use it, and withdraw consent you gave. Laws such as the GDPR, the UK GDPR and California's CCPA give these rights. To use any of them, email hello@bookmytalk.dev. We'll reply within one month, and we may ask you to confirm from the email address involved so we know the request is yours.
If you think we've handled your data wrongly, please tell us first so we can put it right. You can also complain to the data protection authority where you live.
We don't sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, as California law defines those terms.
Children
Book My Talk is for people aged 16 and over, and we don't knowingly collect data from anyone younger. If you think a child has given us personal data, email hello@bookmytalk.dev and we'll delete it.
Changes to this policy
When this policy changes, we'll update it here and change the date at the top. If a change affects how we use data you've already given us, we'll also email speakers before it takes effect.
Contact
Awais Kamran, Book My Talk. Email hello@bookmytalk.dev, or leave a note on the feedback page with “Show it on the public board” unticked so only we see it.