Privacy Policy

Last updated: 29 October 2026

Art and Artists World ("we", "us", "our") is committed to protecting your personal information. This policy is written to meet the standards of the EU and UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and we apply those standards to everyone who uses the platform, wherever you live. Where your local law gives you additional rights, those rights also apply.

This policy explains what personal information we collect, how we use it, who we share it with, and your rights regarding that information.

1. Information We Collect

Artist profiles

When you register an artist profile, we collect:

  • Full name and preferred name/moniker
  • Email address
  • Phone number (optional)
  • Biographical information and artist statement
  • Profile photograph (optional)
  • Artworks (images, titles, descriptions, prices, medium, dimensions)
  • Education, exhibitions, awards, publications, collections, and commissions
  • Website and social media URLs (optional)
  • Country, and physical address (optional, for display on your public profile)

Gallery profiles

When you register a gallery profile, we collect:

  • Gallery name and contact person's name
  • Email address
  • Phone number (optional)
  • Gallery description (optional)
  • Gallery image (optional)
  • Artworks uploaded by the gallery (images, titles, descriptions, prices)
  • Artists represented by the gallery (optional)
  • Physical address, city, and country (optional, for display on your public profile)
  • Website and social media URLs (optional)

Archive profiles

The platform includes archival profiles compiled from publicly available sources such as exhibition catalogues and historical records. Some of these profiles were originally published on artandartists.co.za, a platform also operated by us, and we name that source here because you are entitled to know where information about you came from. These profiles were not created by the artists themselves and typically contain only professional information — name, biography, exhibition history and images of work. You may ask us to correct or remove such a profile at any time; see Your Rights below.

Visitors

When you visit the site or use the contact form, we may collect:

  • Name and email address (via contact forms)
  • For messages sent through an artist or gallery contact form: your IP address, kept with your name, email address and the opening of your message in a security log, to detect and stop abuse of the forms
  • IP address and browser information (automatically via server logs)
  • Pages visited and interaction data (via analytics, where enabled and consented to)

Community forum

When you participate in the community forum, we collect and store:

  • The text content of your posts and replies
  • Any images you upload to forum posts
  • Your topic subscription preferences (used to send email notifications when new replies are posted)

Forum posts are publicly visible and associated with your display name. You may edit your posts within 30 minutes of posting. Administrators may remove forum content at any time. If you delete your account, all your forum posts and uploaded images will be permanently removed.

Premium subscribers

If you take out a Premium subscription, payment is handled by Stripe, through its Link service, which acts as the merchant of record. Your card or banking details are collected directly by Stripe on its own checkout page — they never pass through our platform, and we never see or store card numbers or banking details.

What we do store is limited to what we need to give you the features you paid for:

  • Your subscription status and whether Premium is currently active
  • The start and renewal dates of your subscription
  • Identifiers issued by Stripe that link your account to your subscription and customer record with them

Stripe handles your payment data as an independent controller under its own privacy policy, which we would encourage you to read before subscribing. You can also manage your orders, and ask Link to delete your payment data, at link.com.

2. How We Use Your Information

We use your personal information to:

  • Create and maintain your artist or gallery profile on our platform
  • Display your profile, artworks, and contact details (where you have opted in) to the public
  • Manage Premium subscriptions, renewals and cancellations
  • Send you service-related communications (account setup, profile approval, subscription notices)
  • Send marketing emails about platform features or opportunities, where you have consented or where permitted by law (you may unsubscribe at any time)
  • Respond to enquiries submitted through contact forms
  • Improve our platform through analytics and usage data
  • Forward visitor messages to artists via the contact form (your email is used as Reply-To)

We do not use your content or personal information to train machine learning or generative AI systems, and we do not permit third parties to scrape the platform for that purpose.

3. Legal Bases for Processing

Under the GDPR we rely on the following legal bases:

  • Consent — for marketing emails and for non-essential cookies and analytics. You may withdraw consent at any time.
  • Contract — processing necessary to provide your account and any subscription you take out.
  • Legitimate interests — operating, securing and improving the platform, and maintaining an archival record of art history, balanced against your rights and freedoms.
  • Legal obligation — where we must retain or disclose information to comply with the law.

4. Third-Party Services

We use, or may use, the following third-party services that process data on our behalf:

  • Web hosting and email delivery providers — to run the platform and send transactional email
  • Google Analytics — website usage statistics, where enabled and consented to
  • Meta (Facebook) Pixel — advertising measurement, where enabled and consented to
  • Google reCAPTCHA — spam protection on forms, subject to Google's privacy policy
  • Stripe — our payment provider and, through its Link service, merchant of record for Premium subscriptions. Stripe collects your payment details directly and handles billing, tax, receipts and payment support, under its own privacy policy.

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information to any third party.

5. Cookies and Tracking

Our platform uses cookies for:

  • Essential cookies — session management, login functionality and security (CSRF protection). These are required for the site to work and are used without consent, as permitted by law.
  • Analytics and advertising cookies — used only where you have given consent, and only where those services are enabled.

When you first visit, we ask whether you accept analytics cookies. Nothing beyond the essential cookies is loaded unless you accept. You can change your choice at any time using the Cookie Settings link in the footer of every page, or disable cookies in your browser settings — though that may affect site functionality.

6. International Transfers

The platform serves users worldwide, and our hosting and service providers may process your information in countries other than your own, including outside the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom. Where we transfer personal data internationally, we rely on an adequacy decision where one exists, or on appropriate safeguards such as the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses. You may request details of the safeguards applied by contacting us.

7. Data Retention

  • Artist and gallery profiles — retained for as long as your account is active. Archive profiles are retained to preserve the historical record of art, unless you ask us to remove yours.
  • Account data — if you delete your account, all associated personal data, artworks, and profile information are permanently removed. Copies may persist in encrypted backups for a limited period before being overwritten.
  • Contact form messages — forwarded by email and not stored in a database. The security log entry for each message sent through an artist or gallery contact form (IP address, name, email address and the first 300 characters) is deleted automatically after 90 days.
  • Subscription records — Stripe retains transaction and tax records for as long as its own legal obligations require, independently of us. Deleting your account here does not erase Stripe's accounting records, which it must keep by law.
  • Analytics data — governed by the retention settings of the analytics provider.

8. Your Rights

Wherever you live, we will honour the following requests:

  • Access — request a copy of the personal information we hold about you
  • Rectification — request that inaccurate information be corrected (you can also do this directly from your dashboard)
  • Erasure — request that your personal information and account be deleted
  • Restriction — ask us to limit how we process your information while a query is resolved
  • Portability — receive the information you provided to us in a structured, machine-readable format
  • Object — object to processing based on legitimate interests, and to processing for direct marketing at any time
  • Withdraw consent — at any time, without affecting the lawfulness of processing carried out beforehand
  • Unsubscribe — opt out of marketing emails using the unsubscribe link in any email we send

If you are in California, you additionally have the right to know what personal information we collect and how it is used, the right to request deletion, and the right not to be discriminated against for exercising those rights. We do not sell personal information as that term is defined under California law.

To exercise any of these rights, contact us at info@artandartistsworld.com. We will respond within one month, and will not charge you for doing so.

9. Data Security

We take reasonable measures to protect your personal information, including:

  • SSL/TLS encryption on all pages
  • Passwords stored using industry-standard hashing (never stored in plain text)
  • Access to personal data restricted to authorised administrators

No online platform can be completely secure. If a data breach occurs that is likely to result in a risk to your rights, we will notify you and the relevant supervisory authority as required by law.

10. Children's Privacy

Our platform is not intended for use by persons under the age of 18. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, please contact us and we will delete it.

11. Changes to This Policy

We may update this privacy policy from time to time. Changes will be posted on this page with a revised "Last updated" date. Where changes materially affect how we use your information, we will give reasonable notice.

12. Contact and Complaints

The data controller is Art and Artists World, operated from the Republic of Croatia. For any privacy-related enquiry or complaint, contact us:

Email: info@artandartistsworld.com
Art and Artists World, Republic of Croatia

If you are not satisfied with our response, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the data protection authority in your country. In the EEA this is the supervisory authority of the member state where you live or work; in the UK it is the Information Commissioner's Office. Our own supervisory authority is the Croatian Personal Data Protection Agency (AZOP).