What we collect, why we collect it, how long we keep it and what you can ask us to do about it.
The Fiber+Fabric Craft Festival is organized by Koelnmesse Inc., 8770 W Bryn Mawr Ave, Suite 1300, Chicago, IL 60631, United States. Koelnmesse Inc. is the controller of the personal data described here. You can reach us at info@fiberfabriccraft.com or +1.630.748.7394.
This policy covers the Fiber+Fabric Craft Festival website. It does not cover the separate platforms we link out to, each of which has its own policy: our registration and call-for-speakers platform (Swoogo), our exhibitor application forms (JotForm), our merchandise store, and our exhibitor services contractor. When you follow a link to one of those, their policy governs what happens next.
Our host records standard technical information for every request, including your IP address, the page requested, the time, your browser and operating system, and the page that referred you. This is ordinary server logging and we use it to keep the site running and secure.
We also run analytics on this site, which involves cookies and, in one case, a reconstruction of your visit. That is described in full under Website Analytics and Session Recording below, because it is the part most people want the detail on.
If you email us, use our contact form, sign up for the newsletter, or text JOIN to our SMS number, we receive what you send: typically your name, email address, phone number where relevant, and the content of your message. We use it to answer you and, where you asked for it, to send you festival updates.
We do not take payments on this website, and we do not ask for financial details on it. Ticket purchases and exhibitor applications happen on the third-party platforms named above. We do not knowingly collect data from children; see Children.
We do not sell your personal data, and we do not sell or share attendee lists. If someone offers to sell you a list of our attendees, they are not acting for us; see Beware of Scams.
Nothing here runs until you choose. Analytics and session recording stay switched off until you accept them in the cookie banner. Decline, or ignore the banner, and neither tool stores anything on your device or records your visit.
Google Analytics 4 tells us how many people visit, which pages they look at, roughly where in the world they are, and how they arrived. It uses cookies and collects your IP address. We use it in aggregate, to understand traffic patterns, not to identify you.
Microsoft Clarity does something more involved, and we would rather you heard it from us plainly. Clarity records your visit. It is not a video of your screen or your camera. It is a reconstruction, built from the structure of the page plus a log of what you did on it, replayed afterwards as though it were a video. It captures where you moved your pointer, what you clicked or tapped, how far you scrolled and how long you stayed. We use it to find the places where our own pages confuse people, and it produces the heatmaps that show which parts of a page get attention.
What is kept out of a recording. We run Clarity in its strictest masking mode: all text on the page and all images are masked. Every piece of text, whether you typed it or the page displayed it, is replaced by placeholder characters on your own device before the recording is sent, so neither Microsoft nor we ever receive it. That covers your name, your email address and anything else you enter. What a recording shows is the structure of the page and how you moved through it, not what it said.
Opting out. Decline in the cookie banner, and neither tool runs. If you accepted and changed your mind, clear this site's cookies and site data in your browser and the banner will ask you again. You can also block the scripts with a tracking-blocker extension, use private browsing, or email us and ask us to delete data associated with you, and we will.
Both tools involve transfers of data to the United States and, in Microsoft's case, potentially to other countries where it operates. Clarity data is retained by Microsoft for a limited period and then deleted; Google Analytics retention is set on our property. We can confirm the current retention settings on request.
We share personal data only with organizations that need it to provide a service to us, and only for that purpose. That includes our website host, our email and newsletter provider, Google and Microsoft for the analytics described above, and the registration, application and store platforms when you choose to use them. We also disclose data where the law requires it.
We share data with our parent company, Koelnmesse GmbH in Germany, and with other Koelnmesse group companies where necessary to run the festival and the wider h+h family of events.
We are based in the United States and our service providers are largely in the United States. If you contact us from outside the US, including from the EU, EEA or UK, your data is transferred to and processed in the United States, and to Germany where it involves our parent company. Where required, those transfers rely on appropriate safeguards such as the European Commission's standard contractual clauses.
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to ask us for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, to correct it, to delete it, to restrict or object to how we use it, to receive it in a portable form, and to withdraw consent you previously gave. If you are in California, you also have the right not to be discriminated against for exercising those rights. We do not sell personal data.
To exercise any of these, email info@fiberfabriccraft.com. We may need to verify who you are before we act, which protects you as much as us. If you are in the EU, EEA or UK and you are unhappy with our response, you can complain to your local data protection authority.
We send festival news, programme announcements and offers to people who signed up for them. Every email has an unsubscribe link, and it works. For SMS, reply STOP. Unsubscribing from marketing does not stop transactional messages about something you specifically asked for or bought.
We use appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect personal data, including encryption in transit. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security, but we take it seriously and we respond quickly when something is wrong.
The festival is family-friendly and children are very welcome at the event. This website, however, is intended for adults. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 13. If you believe a child has given us personal data, contact us and we will delete it.
This site links to other websites, including our sister events, our exhibitors and our social media. We are not responsible for their privacy practices. Read their policies before giving them your data.
We update this policy when what we do changes. The date below tells you when it was last revised. Material changes will be flagged on the site.
Questions, requests or complaints about privacy: info@fiberfabriccraft.com, or write to Koelnmesse Inc., 8770 W Bryn Mawr Ave, Suite 1300, Chicago, IL 60631, United States.
